The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Global Voices Advocacy (GVA) are jointly seeking two interns to work from EFF’s offices in San Francisco for summer 2013. University students and recent graduates with excellent writing skills and a deep understanding of free expression, openness, and privacy on the global Internet are strongly encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities
Interns will focus on individual cases of bloggers, hackers, and social media users facing threats of censorship, harassment, arrest, or worse because of their activities online. Interns will work on a variety of projects through which they will document and analyze these cases, developing a range of skills along the way. Interns will be charged with:

Updating existing content and developing new content for Threatened Voices, a crowdsourced platform that documents individual cases of harassment, arrest, imprisonment and other threats as they are experienced by netizens around the world;

Investigating networks to discover at-risk or threatened individuals across the world, including technologists working on combating censorship and surveillance.

Assisting with development of OnlineCensorship.org, a crowdsourced platform for instances of censorship on social networks.

Providing advocacy support for cases selected from Threatened Voices and OnlineCensorship.

Assisting with blog posts to be published on EFF’s Deeplinks blog and GVA’s site. Posts will cover topics such as developments in Internet policy, Internet censorship, netizen harassment, and legal cases pertaining to digital rights. Interns with country- or region-specific knowledge may be asked to develop more in-depth writing projects, undertake translation, or assist in creating contact networks among communities in their region.

Skills sought

Although we will consider applicants with a range of knowledge and skills, we are particularly interested in those whose experience includes:

Persuasive writing

Digital rights advocacy

Data visualization and measurement tools

Interns will have opportunities to participate and contribute to organizational discussions and strategy sessions at both EFF and GVA.

Requirements and desired qualities

All applicants must demonstrate a commitment to using fact-based reporting to defend the exercise of human rights online. Other requirements include:

Knowledge of international Internet rights and human rights frameworks

Knowledge of politics and culture in countries outside North America
and the EU, particularly those where netizens are routinely under threat

Proven writing skills

Attention to detail

Ability to conduct efficient, effective online research

Experience using information-sharing platforms and tools

Fluency or high proficiency in one or multiple foreign languages
(particularly Arabic or Russian) is preferred but not required.

Details
Interns will be asked to work 15 -20 hours per week, and to commit 10 -12 weeks (June – August) to the project, depending on availability. Interns must be able to work most days from the offices of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. Internships are unpaid and, unfortunately, we are not currently able to sponsor visas.

Interested applicants should send a cover letter, resume, and two short writing samples (ideally 1,000 words or less) to gvaeffinterns [at] gmail [dot] com. Position open until filled. Any questions concerning the internship can also be sent to this address.